Gutenberg and the Printing Press with Movable Type
Some time around 1454 or 1455, in a workshop in the Rhineland city of Mainz, a team of craftsmen working under the direction of…
23 min read
Category
Technology
The Antikythera Mechanism
In the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, in a dimly lit case, lie the corroded remains of a bronze instrument that was lifted from…
23 min read
The Apollo Program and the Moon Landing
On the morning of 16 July 1969, at 9:32 AM local time, three men in the white coveralls of the National Aeronautics and Space…
24 min read
Mavis Versus Other Coding Agents
Two years into the generative AI boom, the question that every developer, founder, and operator is asking is no longer whether an AI can…
28 min read
The Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test
At 5:29:45 in the morning of July 16, 1945, in a remote stretch of the New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto,…
23 min read
AlphaFold and the Protein Folding Problem
For half a century the protein folding problem was the most famous unsolved question in molecular biology. The question was simple to state and…
13 min read
The Discovery of Nuclear Fission
In the late afternoon of December 17, 1938, in a chemistry laboratory on the outskirts of Berlin, two chemists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute…
23 min read
China’s Surveillance State
For most of the past two decades the Chinese government has been building the largest video surveillance network in the history of computing. The…
29 min read
The ASIC Era
For most of the modern computing era the most interesting chips were general-purpose ones. A processor was judged by how many different kinds of…
46 min read
The Custom Silicon War
The Custom-Silicon War – Google’s TPU, Amazon’s Trainium, and the End of the GPU Monopoly For the better part of three years, the conventional…
20 min read
The Discovery of Quantum Mechanics and Superposition
Among the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, the discovery of quantum mechanics and the formulation of the superposition principle stand as the most…
22 min read
The Search for Room Temperature Superconductors
Among the scientific holy grails of the modern era, the search for a room-temperature superconductor, a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at…
22 min read
The Discovery of High-Temperature Superconductors
Among the discoveries of twentieth century physics, the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity by the IBM Zurich research team of Karl Alex Müller and Johannes…
23 min read
Optical Interconnects Break the AI Power Wall
The question of whether optical interconnects can break the AI power wall by 2028 became, in the AI Infra Summit 2026 panel discussions, the…
16 min read
The Chip to Grid Data Center
The phrase “chip-to-grid” emerged from the Open Compute Project 2026 summit as the organizing principle for the next generation of AI data-centre design. The…
16 min read
The 7.6 Trillion Dollar AI Infrastructure Buildout
In September 2026, the Goldman Sachs Global Institute and Global Investment Research teams published a research note that put forward a forecast whose sheer…
16 min read
The HBM4 Era and the Memory Wall
The phrase “memory wall” has, by late 2026, become one of the most-cited pieces of jargon in the AI infrastructure industry, just as the…
17 min read
The Power Wall in the AI Buildout
The phrase “power wall” has, by late 2026, become one of the most-used terms in the AI infrastructure industry. The phrase was originally a…
19 min read
The Inference First Architecture Shift
The most consequential single architectural insight of the late-2020s AI industry is one that is now obvious in retrospect but that took several years…
18 min read
OpenAI Jalapeno and the Vertical Integration Move
In June 2026, OpenAI confirmed that it had taped out its first custom AI processor, a Broadcom-co-designed inference chip the company had given the…
17 min read
The Hyperscaler Custom Silicon Wave
In October 2026, a short, sharply argued piece on Axios carried the headline that summarized a strategic shift the AI infrastructure industry had been…
19 min read
Microsoft Maia 300 and the Azure Inference Bet
On Monday, October 12, 2026, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President for Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, posted a blog on the Microsoft corporate site that…
18 min read
The Discovery of HIV and the Long Search for the AIDS Virus
In the late spring of 1981, the United States Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, the federal agency responsible for tracking the public…
23 min read
Vera Rubin and the Discovery of Dark Matter
For most of the twentieth century, the picture of a galaxy was the picture Edwin Hubble had given the world in the 1920s and…
25 min read